This dinner was organised by Richard Liu of JD.com and Wang Xin of Meituan Dianping.

JD.com is the second biggest ecommerce player in China and a direct competitor of Alibaba;

Meituan Dianping was previously under the portfolio of Alibaba, but the two companies have since fallen out. Alibaba now has subsidiaries competing against Meituan across all business lines of the latter.

Tencent, the major competitor of Alibaba in almost all fronts, is a key investor of both JD.com & Meituan Dianping.

Five other major companies represented at the dinner are invested by Tencent.

Therefore, there is no surprise that Jack Ma is absent from this dinner, even though Wuzhen, the venue of the dinner, is just one hour drive away from his home base of Hangzhou.